The Feed

UnHerd's blog

Introducing UnHerd

UnHerd.com is a new media platform with a double mission. We aim to appeal to people who instinctively refuse to follow the herd and also want to investigate ‘unheard’ ideas, individuals and communities.

We can’t criticise herd-like behaviour and be a herd ourselves. That’s why our team of writers includes people from the right and left, for example. We have contributors from both liberal and conservative dispositions; staffers who believe in God and atheists. When we produce further reading sections at the end of articles we’ll link to intelligent commentators, books, TED talks, websites etc etc that take different views to those of the article’s author. You should decide what you think – not us for you.

And we want to expand our ‘un-herd’. We launch with many established commentators as our key contributors but one of my top priorities as Editor is to find new writers and we will be inviting people to apply for editorial commissions of up to US$5,000.

We may look a lot like an online newspaper and we’ll be publishing new material each and every day… but we don’t do news. Not most news, anyway. When there’s big news about the five topics that we are focused upon, we’ll cover that but, unlike nearly every media organisation, we don’t even have a television in our office.

What are our five topics? They are (i) making capitalism work for the many; (ii) reconnecting ‘unheard’ communities with centres of political, economic and cultural power; (iii) understanding how we can master new technologies before they master us; (iv) profiling the world’s religions and the impacts they are having; and (v) examining how to better measure and report our fast-changing times.

We’re putting a big emphasis on history. Through Professor Michael Burleigh, Brigadier (retired) Allan Mallinson and a host of guest historians we will be learning from the past at every opportunity.

We have secured a package of investment that will ensure our innovative approach to journalism can last for a number of years but we want our commercial model to be as sound as our editorial content – and will be steadily unveiling a wide variety of paid-for services.